Chris Buskirk: ‘Bama Blowout Signals End of the McConnell Era

Chris Buskirk, the editor and publisher of American Greatness, concludes that Mitch McConnell’s run as Republican leader in the Senate has come to end and that he did himself in.

Buskirk argues that McConnell has broken faith with Republican voters so many times that they’ve lost count, but this time he led the president into an embarrassing and very public defeat all while spending $30 million of other people’s money in the process. However, with Judge Roy Moore victorious, the American nationalist movement that propelled Donald Trump to victory is ascendant. That’s bad news for McConnell but good news for the country, Buskirk reasons.

Judge Roy Moore’s substantial defeat of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s handpicked, well-financed candidate, “Big Luther” Strange in the Alabama Republican Senate Primary is a political earthquake. It shows that the political and cultural tide that propelled Donald Trump past 16 primary opponents and Hillary Clinton into the White House is still running strong.

They present a near-perfect symmetry of cause and effect: McConnell’s brand of timid, ineffectual leadership, on the one hand, leads to a devastating electoral rebuke on the other. Voters served notice—again—that unprincipled, do-nothing Republicans who are more at home in opposition than in power are unneeded and unwanted.

And the Alabama race presented a clear picture of the battle for the soul—and control—of the Republican Party.

Under dubious circumstances, Luther Strange—a well-known ally of the Senate leadership—was appointed to fill the seat previously held by former Senator, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions. For a base Republican electorate already tired of business-as-usual politics, Strange was the avatar of everything wrong with their party: he’s a former Washington lobbyist who, as attorney general of Alabama, seemed to end a corruption investigation of the state’s governor just in time for that same governor appoint him to the U.S. Senate. When faced with questions from Alabama voters, he couldn’t seem to give direct answers to the important issues of the day, from immigration and national security to healthcare and tax reform. That simply confirmed voters’ suspicions that Strange lacked a discernible center of gravity.